Mr. Tharoor offers very interesting insights on Fillon, the quotations from his speeches are telling. He is the Marinetti/Thatcherite candidate that has become the favorite of the ultra-respectable Financial Times. I put Marinetti first , the Futurist/Fascist artist and intellectual, because as reported in the Financial Times, Mr. Fillon is an advocate of ‘speed’ and ‘shock’ in his personal ethos, as well as his Thatcherite political program. The key to their coverage has been not to quote his speeches, that are probably replete with Imperial Nostalgia, but to report on his political rise. And to leave his political apologetics for an argued ‘Benign Empire’ and his religiously rationalized homophobia, under the rubric of his strategically unreported ‘Conservatism’. Emphasis being placed on the utterly failed Neo-Liberalism, the myth of the ‘Free Market’, that is still the object of veneration of the editorialists/hirelings at the Financial Times.

Mr. Thardoor’s essay attempts, in a short form, too many countries and their political actors, in his rhetorical portrait of the ‘global right wing serge’ and their collective Imperial Nostalgia. As Mr. Tandoor writes for the Washington Post, he hews to the Neo-Conservative Party Line of Putin as the New Stalin, and the myth of Russian Revanchism, as unexamined points of Neo-Conservative political theology: The New Cold War that Trump, Fillon and Le Pen are attempting to put into momentary political stasis, pending their political maturation, political enlightenment or their acceptance of the status quo?